Right on!... but Wrong

I'm suffering from philosophical whiplash here. My attention was recently directed toward the Freenet Project, and my initial reaction was "Cool! How do I get involved?" This was so what I was all about! Then I read further. And my mood cooled about 50 degrees. Celsius.

For those of a certain age (like mine), this is not about a "freenet" of the kind you're thinking of, where some outfit offers no-charge access to the internet as a community service. This is about free (as in "free speech") not free (as in "free beer"). It's a system that tries to ensure freedom of speech by offering anonymity, based on the rationale that many people need anonymity to exercise true freedom of speech.

As someone who uses a penname online to avoid employers, potential employers, and such Googling me, I can buy that argument. If my name were attached to every article I post, I'd have to censor myself. And when the Freenet Project people argue that "freedom of speech" has to cover unpopular (and maybe even immoral) topics like racism, terrorism, kiddie porn, etc. I'm inclined to agree.

But where I found myself parting company with the Freenet Project philosophy was with their statement, "You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law." As a practical matter, that may in fact be true. But Freenet founder Ian Clarke just asserts it as some kind of moral truism, and then goes on with a bunch of willfully naive bullshit poo-poo-ing the whole idea of copyright.

His first attempt to dismiss it out of hand is to declare that freedom is more important. That is no more than an expression of his own personal values. I can respect his point of view, but I would expect him to respect others', which he does not.

He then sets up the strawman that people "claim that we would have no art" without copyright, and then pushes that strawman over by stating the obvious fact that people will create things regardless. Of course they will. But when they're forced to do in their spare time because it's impossible to make a living as a creator without the tool of copyright, that's a form of de facto censorship right there.

Next up is the old argument that copyright is already being widely ignored, so why bother with it? Which is the logical equivalent of saying that widespread killing means we shouldn't bother outlawing murder. Maybe we could instead using some of that vaunted free speech to persuade people to stop killing other people instead of just legalising it?

He points at the RIAA cartel to make his case. The RIAA is an abomination (my own characterisation, not his) and deserves to die immediately for the way they've routinely raped recording artists and then charged them for the privilege. Without them the music industry would be a much better place, with musicians actually reaping the benefits of their creative work rather than having their work co-opted by record labels which will proceed to suck them dry.

But that's a problem with the RIAA, not with copyright. In fact, copyright is perhaps the only tool that gives musicians some leverage to fight back against the RIAA. They could start withholding their copyrights from the RIAA, and retake control of their commercial and artistic destiny. Damned if I know why they haven't... but they could.

Astonishingly, Clarke presents the old system of patronage as a better alternative to copyright, as a way to finance the production of creative works. Patronage boils down to: people who have money dictate to people with creativity what they'll create, and they (the creators) have no actual say in the matter. They're just servants who know how to work a brush and paint. It's so astonishingly contrary to the whole concept of free speech that I'm surprised Clarke can suggest it without his head exploding. Artists struggled for centuries to be rid of it. They eventually made their way into the mercantile system, and as the technology for mass reproduction developed, they relied on the ability to charge people for the right to make copies (i.e. copyright) to make that financially viable.

Clarke then ridicules those who ridicule this intellectual discontinuity, by contradicting one of his early arguments. After stating that nobody gives a damn about copyright these days (as evidenced by the rampant "sharing" and downloading of other people's works), he makes the willfully naive claim that people will freely give cash to creators they believe in. Too bad they don't. Sure, some do, but obviously huge numbers of them do not.

Instead Clarke advocates an idea called "fairshare", which - with no apparent connection between the nice-sounding term and what it describes - basically amounts to artists selling stock in themselves, allowing those who buy into them to reap dividends when (through some kind of undescribed voodoo economics) that artist becomes financially "successful". Which is pretty damn difficult to do when the only source of actual income they have for writing songs (for example) are these venture capitalists he wants them to prostitute their creativity to. (A singer/songwriter might be able to make a living by performing, but that doesn't help a just-plain-songwriter, or a musician whose music doesn't lend itself to live performances.)

So what looked at first to be someone championing the right of people to speak their own mind, and to create and publish their own (perhaps very unpopular) ideas on the internet, turns out to be yet another intellectually dishonest attempt to rationalise why people shouldn't have to pay people for their work. It's not about free speech, but a justification for compulsory free beer. As appealing as this may be to the anarcho-libertarian crowd, the reliance of this argument on archaic plutocratic economic models sweeps whatever principles its author may be half-heartedly sympathetic to, effectively irrelevant.